Atwood, Margaret | Neil Besner (review date 1993)
Neil Besner (review date 1993)
SOURCE: “A Poet's Bones,” in Canadian Literature, Vols. 138–139, Fall, 1993, pp. 105–06
[In the following laudatory review of Good Bones, Besner deems the stories in the collection as “fictions for our time, and, arguably, fictions that show Atwood's narrative talents at their finest.”]
Because Atwood is a better poet than a fiction writer, I have always read her novels and short stories with grudging admiration. Yes, I teach The Handmaid's Tale and The Edible Woman, and I recognize the ways in which these and other Atwood novels are exciting in the classroom and out of it, but I would much rather read, teach, talk about her poems.
That this view should run against the rising tide of Atwood's reputation as a novelist might only reflect on the increasingly rarefied readership of poetry in Canada outside of academic circles (increasingly rarefied, it almost seems, in...
[The entire page is 1111 words long]
Navigate
